Saints and Sinners
-
-
3.5 • 2 Ratings
-
-
- £5.49
-
- £5.49
Publisher Description
'Edna O'Brien writes the most beautiful, aching stories of any writer, anywhere.' Alice Munro
'The taboo-breaking, the fabulous prose - there's no one like Edna.' Anne Enright
'Surprising and beautiful and courageous .. A beacon.' Megan Nolan
'Brilliant and brave.' Ann Patchett
'Glittering energy.' Colm Tóibín
A woman walks the streets of Manhattan and contemplates with exquisite longing the precarious affair she has embarked on, amidst the grandeur and cacophony of the cityscape; a young Irish girl and her mother are thrilled to be invited to visit the glamorous Coughlan's but find - for all the promise of their green gorgette, silver shoes and fancy dinner parties - they leave disappointed; an Irishman in north London retraces his life as a young lad with his mates digging the streets and dreaming of the apocryphal gold, an outsider both in Ireland and England, yet he carries the lodestar of his native land.
This classic collection glows with Edna O'Brien's trademark lyricism, powerful evocations of place, and heart-breaking insight into the desires and contradictions of humanity.
This ebook features the first chapter of Edna O'Brien's stunning final novel, Girl.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Brien (The Light of Evening) mixes her trademark lyricism with a brutal depiction of lives marred by violence, whether a pining lover whose life has been upended or a dreamer whose fate leads him to a cold death in the wild. "Sinners" depicts one night in the life of a fusty innkeeper whose prudish disgust at a trio of guests is slowly revealed to have roots in her own loneliness. In "Black Flower" a former prison art teacher drives to the countryside with a newly released veteran of Ireland's freedom fights and a likely target for revenge. The narrator of "Plunder" is a young girl caught in a civil war who describes cowering in fear and her torments at the hands of the enemy. Another young girl narrates "Green Georgette" and endures the emotional hardship of class divisions, while in "Send My Roots Rain" a woman sits in a Dublin hotel lobby awaiting a reclusive poet and thinks back on love affairs and disappointments. And in "Manhattan Medley" a transplant to the big city begins an affair with a man and describes in rich prose how it has permeated her life. Throughout, tragedy mingles with beauty, yearning with survival, and destruction with moments of grace.
